Spatial environmental data analysis with R

GEO 503

• Course: Mondays 3-5pm 144 Wilkeson Quad
• Office Hours: Mondays 3-5pm, 120 Wilkeson Quad

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• Open source
• Data manipulation
• Data analysis tools
• Great graphics
• Programming language
• 6,000+ free, community-contributed packages
• A supportive and increasing user community

R is a dialect of the S language and environment developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T) by John Chambers and colleagues (the same group that developed C and UNIX©)

• an effective data handling and storage facility
• a suite of operators for (vectorized) calculations
• a large, coherent, integrated collection of tools for data analysis
• graphical capabilities (screen or hardcopy)
• a well-developed, simple, and effective programming language which includes
  • conditionals
  • loops
  • user defined functions
  • input and output facilities

Over 6k packages! Task Views organize packages by topic: [http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/]

If you can imagine it…

source

Packages: sp, maptools, rgeos, raster, ggmap

Example: species range overlays source

Packages: sp, maptools, rgeos, raster, ggmap

Example: Visualizing Data with basemaps with ggmap source

• Just-in-time compilation:
  • Slower than compiled languages (-)
  • Faster to compose and develop (+)
• Many available packages (+)
• Most operations conducted in RAM
  • RAM can be limiting and/or expensive (-)
  • “Error: cannot allocate vector of size X Mb”
  • Various packages and clever programming can overcome this… (+)
• Free like beer and speech! (+)